June 13, 2023

Spring was a busy season for undergraduate research at Drexel. With help from UREP, students received grants, traveled to conferences, pitched their work, and more!

Spring Mini-Grants

Thirteen student-faculty pairs were awarded Spring Term Undergraduate Research Mini-Grants. Each Mini-Grant funded up to $2000 in research expenses, including equipment and materials and pay for student researchers. Mini-Grant recipients presented their research at the 2023 Week of Undergraduate Excellence Virtual Poster Session.

See the projects funded by Spring Mini-Grants

Conferences

Sixteen students received UREP travel grants during the Spring Term to present their work at conferences, including the Yale Undergraduate Research Symposium, the International Society for Autism Research Annual Meeting in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Larval Fish Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

UREP staff traveled with students to two conferences in April: the World Conference on Undergraduate Research (WCUR) at the University of Warwick in the UK, and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Students shared their research through posters and oral presentations.

Special congratulations to Alyssa Kemp, environmental engineering ’25, who won second place in the Social Sciences and Humanities category in the WiSys Quick Pitch competition at NCUR!

AAAS E-Poster Competition

Nine Drexel undergraduate students received honors in the 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting student e-poster competition. Several of these students received travel grants from UREP to attend the conference in Washington, DC.

• Monisha Gupta, Undergraduate First Place in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
  “Optimization of cPTs to Improve Affinity and Potency to Target HIV-1 gp120 Trimer”
• Abhishek (Abe) Jeyapratap, Undergraduate First Place in Brain and Behavior
  “A Structural Connectivity-Driven Neuroimaging Biomarker for Autism Spectrum Disorder”
• Nawal Syed, Undergraduate Honorable Mention in Brain and Behavior
  “Sex-Related Differences in PACAP Expression in The PVT of Rats”
• Daniel Freeman, Undergraduate First Place in Developmental Biology Genetics and Immunology
  “History of Genome Reduction in Cephalotes Gut Symbionts”
• Rahul Inaganti, Undergraduate Honorable Mention in Environment and Ecology
  “Wolbachia-Mediated Protection Fails Against the Fungal Pathogen, Beauvaria Bassiana”
• Aayush Mehta, Undergraduate Honorable Mention in Medicine and Public Health
  “Is There a Difference in Ankle Fracture Treatment Depending on Patient Gender?”
• Yan Burets, Undergraduate Honorable Mention in Physical Sciences
  “Parametric Study of Mxene Current Collectors for Lithium-Metal-Based Batteries”
• Abryana Kevelier-Williams, Undergraduate First Place in Social Sciences
  “A Typology of America's Most Lethal Mass Shooters, 1991-2022”
• Jeffrey Busa, Undergraduate Honorable Mention in Technology, Engineering and Math
  “Synthesis of Large Flakes of Ti3C2Tx Mxene”

Publications

Adeeb Abbas, computer engineering ’23, published “Radio Modulation Classification Using Deep Residual Neural Networks” in the 2022 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), now indexed in IEEE Xplore. Adeeb received a Spring 2021 Undergraduate Research Mini-Grant from UREP to work on this project with Dr. Kapil Dandekar in the College of Engineering.

Satvik Tripathi, computer science ’26, published two articles with his faculty mentor, Dr. Edward Kim: “HematoNet: Expert level classification of bone marrow cytology morphology in hematological malignancy with deep learning” in Artificial Intelligence in the Life Sciences and “RadGenNets: Deep learning-based radiogenomics model for gene mutation prediction in lung cancer” in Informatics in Medicine Unlocked. Satvik received Undergraduate Research Mini-Grants in Winter 2022 and Winter 2023 to pursue research with Dr. Kim.

Week of Undergraduate Excellence

UREP and the Pennoni Honors College celebrated the 2023 Week of Undergraduate Excellence (WUE) during the week of May 15. Highlights of the week included a virtual poster session featuring 51 undergraduate student researchers and the first annual WUE Quick Pitch Competition. Thirteen students presented three-minute, one-slide pitches on their research/creative projects, community engagement, and academic global experiences. 

Congratulations to the Quick Pitch winner, Tasneem Siddique, biological sciences ’25, for her presentation “The Effect of Synthetic Aβ on Ciliary Membrane and Axonemal Proteins.”

Congratulations to our SuperNova Seniors!

Twelve graduating seniors have completed the SuperNova Undergraduate Research Fellows Program, demonstrating their commitment to research and related activities throughout their undergraduate careers. We’re so proud of their hard work and wish them the best as they take this next step in their lives!

The SuperNova application is currently open to current sophomores through seniors. Applications close on Monday, July 17, 2023.

Read more about our SuperNova seniors

STAR Scholars

The 2023 cohort of STAR Scholars is about to start diving into research! 123 rising second-year students will be participating in this full-time, faculty-mentored research program this summer.

Save the date for the STAR Scholars Summer Showcase, happening on August 31, where our students will present the results of their work!